Lack of Leadership Has Ruined Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is in a shocking and distressing state of disrepair. The reason for this tragic but very preventable and easy-to-remedy disaster is known to just about everyone I talked to: WE LACK LEADERSHIP.

I made the effort to visit Zvimba, where I do have relatives, including even that ONE. The same poverty I saw everywhere I visited was before my own eyes even within smelling distance of President Mugabe's village compound. Driving west along the very modern Bulawayo Road and then the Robert Mugabe Highway to Zvimba, you see nothing but very obvious fingerprints of a man-made disaster. Apart from the above-named roads, just about all the roads you have to use to get to said roads are real and present deathtraps.

It is not just the terrible roads, which we can mend in a matter of months if we had leaders rather than rulers. Along Bulawayo Road, you will see farmland that is either being overrun by the wilderness or being underutilized by a few women ineffectually poking the earth with little hoes. You see all these disasters all the way past Kutama Mission.

All President Mugabe needs to do to see how badly the country has suffered under his leadership is commandeer his motorcade straight into the town of Norton's decayed industrial area. It is not difficult to miss. Straight ahead after turning right from Bulawayo road stands a complex of grain-storage silos. The silos are in a fenced area within which are patches of unseemly and uncut tufts of grass. There are a few pathetic mango trees, too. I even saw some bloke in sandals, with the chap looking bored. Around the area, there are abandoned industries that looked like they were dependent on the granary complex. To my amazement, even the Doves Morgan funeral parlour in the complex looks like it was abandoned.

I fail to understand how President Mugabe has failed to see this national disaster. What is very evident along the route he takes when he visits his own village is what I am talking about. Is he simply incapable of seeing what is before his own eyes or is it a matter of lacking care? For the same question, we must demand answers from our councilors, members of parliament and mayors. Robert Mugabe is not solely responsible for the destruction of Zimbabwe, we must admit. All of us played a part. This catastrophe is on all of us. We must ask hard questions and demand real answers out of ourselves, too.

I did not have the opportunity to visit every village and town in Zimbabwe. However, every place I visited had been visited by the same ruination caused by sheer negligence and a very obvious lack of leadership. We have an incipient scourge of youths taking recreational drugs.  At the rural shopping centres, one encounters these drug-popping youths and elderly men asking for a dollar with which to buy the cheap Chibuku opaque bear.  One is left with the impression that desperation has driven our people into finding solace in illicit drugs and beer.  It is a doomed nation which passively watches its youths wasting away their lives through the consumption of alcohol and mind-bending drugs.  We have a disaster before our own eyes.  

Without an iota of doubt, this disaster, if what I saw is symptomatic of the state of the nation, is a very comprehensive condemnation of our leaders, all of them from local councilors to the president.  The damnation is quite thorough when the ordinary people pine for the days of Ian Smith, the same who was so oppressive he drove the poor and subjugated people to pick up arms to kill and risk getting killed in the quest for freedom.  When the same people who defeated Ian Smith and the Rhodesian establishment on the battlefield longingly reminisce over the Ian Smith era, it is a complete condemnation of the current leadership.  It is an embarrassment to black people who have to endure the taunts of the naysayers who used to say black Africans are incapable of running Zimbabwe.  Now they have Zimbabwe's mess to give credence to that stereotype.

Beyond engaging in a self-recriminating exercise, we have to act to bring back the kind of Zimbabwe we want to have and give to our children and grandchildren as their inheritance. Let us not ask this government, or any entity whatsoever, to do for us what we can do and are capable of doing for ourselves. If President Mugabe has lacked the will to uplift Zvimba, he may also be unable to develop a place like Zaka or Zimunya. We will have to rebuild Zimbabwe a village compound at a time and likewise an urban street road at a time. That effort requires family and local leadership rather than the national one.

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